Building a fasting product around the timer
As founding designer, I redesigned the timer, added the core product flows, and grew the design team to five.
- The challenge
- Give people reasons to return to a fasting timer, while building accounts and a paid product around it.
- My contribution
- I shaped the core experience and led design as the team grew to five.
- The result
- Zero expanded into a product with visual fasting zones, accounts, subscriptions, content, and history.
In this project
Start with the existing habit
I joined Zero as its founding designer. I had worked with the founder before at FitStar. The app was a numerical fasting timer, without accounts, profiles, or a subscription.
People downloaded it, tracked for a while, and often stopped. We needed to give them a reason to return. The timer was already the core habit, so I started there.
Give elapsed time more meaning
I redesigned the timer as a circular display and introduced visual fasting zones. The zones added context as a fast progressed, giving people more to follow than a number.
I kept the timer at the center of the experience. That let us add depth around an action people already knew.
Build the product around the timer
My work covered onboarding, accounts, subscriptions, content, history, and social features. I also worked on Apple Watch, widgets, and the design system. As the product expanded, I grew the design team to five.
Adding accounts exposed a difficult transition. Existing users now had to register to save their history across devices. We explained the benefit, but some users still left. A necessary system change had become an interruption to an established habit.
Define the paid product earlier
Zero grew from a timer into a broader consumer product. Fasting zones became an important part of the paid experience.
The free app already met the main need for many users. Adding value to the paid product remained difficult. I would define the free and paid boundaries earlier next time, alongside the core experience.
Movable
Next projectI designed, built, and released a native iOS app for adults over 50, including its exercise videos and audio.